This chapter addresses the constantly shifting forms that mediated audiences’ experiences of admired antiquities from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. Literary texts and reproductive prints not only diffused knowledge of ancient art, but shaped new creation in literature and the visual arts, which in turn contributed to the establishment of new aesthetic norms. Through analyses of authors ranging from Lessing to Winckelmann, from Coleridge to Blake, from George Eliot to Henry James, and culminating with Ruskin and Pater, this chapter argues that the emergence of an ever-more abstract and formalist vision of antiquity was shaped by the ongoing shifts in the cultural presence of antique objects.
